Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
The Neural Archive is a repository of publications collected by us during the years. Browse our collection here.
Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.
The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.
Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.
YesNo by Timo Kahlen feels like “traditional” net art, a well crafted stuck webpage for the user’s aural and clickable enjoyment.
The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”
Harsh Noise Wally, is a sophisticated mashup mixing strips of Wally, the lazy and cynic colleague of Dilbert with some epic noise music extreme attitudes. Well conceived and assembled.
Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400
GoPro ancestors in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly sport and movie persons like F1 driver Jackie Stewart, Bob Sinclair and Steve McQueen.
In the early days of the web, public webcams situated outside allowed for the ‘globalisation of time in your own bedroom’ for the very first time. The confluence of different times flowing on the screen split our sense of presence, →
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-1478006602, English, 240 pages, 2020, USA
Whenever we want to date the first examples of media art (from antiquity to the 20th Century), there are a few influential moments in history →
Liat Segal’s ”Random Walk” is a large installation composed of 3 sections: in ‘Cause’ a taut latex structure is teased and released to flip a coin whose results appear as binary data on a nearby screen; in ‘Effect’, these digits →
2 x 10″ vinyl – Arbitrary
Copenhagen-based musician and composer Mads Emil Nielsen generally works with hybrid sources, made from sounds combined with glitches, calibrated drums and orchestral samples. The eclectic experimenter founded his own label, Arbitrary, in 2014, while →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517908102, English, 381 pages, 2020, USA
With the disproportionate power accumulating in its giant companies (Apple just topped Italy’s GDP, for example), how are Silicon Valley ideologies evolving? ‘Technosolutionism’ has →
Bricolage is an installation that grows in the incubator that hosts it. Some “bio-bots” grow in this protected environment: they are autonomous cellular structures, specifically bioengineered by Nathan Thompson, Guy Ben-Ary and Sebastian Diecke. Bio-bots are made of blood cells, →
CD – Gruenrekorder
During the 20th edition of Kamuna on August 4th 2018, a habitual music event in the Karlsruhe Museum, three different in-situ performances took place. The locations were the project room ßpace, the space Halo ARS and the →
NYU Press, ISBN-13: 978-1479829965, English, 288 pages, 2020, USA
It is essential, now more than ever, to understand Blackness, and this book investigates African American Cybercultures with the methodology of CTDA (Critical Technoculture Discourse Analysis). It’s →
One of the industrial sectors which has been conceptually affected the most by Covid-19 lockdowns is the airline industry. The inability to fly somewhere else together with the suddenly increased danger around us, has redefined the ‘flight’ as both a →
Neural 66, State of Emergency. Subscribe now!
Issue #66, Summer 2020 ISSN: 2037-108X
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CD – empreintes DIGITALes
Oscillations planétaires is the first solo album by Chantal Dumas, referencing geological phenomena and processes. Dumas seems to suggest that field recording and electroacoustic sound might have a strong correspondence with cosmic activities. The release is →
ECAL, ISBN-13: 978-2970135647, English, 46 pages, 2020, Switzerland
There have been some experiments with books incorporating a wi-fi server in the past (such as the Weise7 in/compatible Laboratorium Archive), but most of them aim →
Anna Dumitriu has developed a number of artworks that blend DNA with textiles, all in controversial circumstances. Her latest “The Plague Dress” involves a 1665 style raw silk, hand-dyed with walnut husks, referencing Nicholas Culpeper, a herbalist of the time →
CD – Unsounds
The Body Imitates the Landscape is published by Unsounds, a label focused on sound art, contemporary composition and free form experimentation. The project was initially conceived as a sound installation by artist Adi Hollander. Hollander used different →
